As a college student, I had a real miracle happen in the form of incidentally ending up in an intro to poetry class with Martín Espada. Learning from Martín changed my life in many directions, but today I’m here to think with you all about a central ethos of his mentorship, that “the purpose of poetry is to communicate.”
Who doesn’t love the good company of a great book, when reading feels like having a conversation? I especially love collections that lean into the everyday, and writers who bring their attention to bear on the seemingly inconsequential, the mundane, rendering it sacred. It’s this admiration that led me to the project of my own book, and it’s why I called that book Small Talk.
Lately, I’ve been returning to the books that have kept me such good company with new questions: How are these books thinking about and/or with the reader? How are they using form to change what kinds of thinking are possible? Who else is in the room of the poems? What do these poems believe, and how does the poet attempt to communicate that?
For this list, I’ve gathered together a group of writers that talk to their readers in ways that are innovative and permissive; books that changed what I could imagine a book might be capable of doing. In these pages, writers find meaning in a bag of Funyuns, a daughter’s socks at a bowling alley, a monarch butterfly on a wrinkled shirt, a friend eating strawberries, and so much more.
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